Quite recently I updated my iPhone 4 to the latest iOS after seeing the advertised enhancements. I do believe that there are improvements to the UI and of course there are downsides too. However I didn’t expect it to increase my data usage in such a large magnitude.

Usually 1GB would last me about a month since I use the phone mainly for email and messaging. However after upgrading to the latest iOS7 and coincidentally recharging my data credit, I noticed that the phone burned through 600mb of data in one day. Now that’s really odd! I can understand that this kind of things can happen if I watch streaming videos or download a lot of applications, but in that day I didn’t do much aside from sending messages and reading/writing e-mails. So what happen?

Cellular Usages

The handy thing about iOS 7 is the ability to check how much data has been used by checking the cellular usages per applications.

This is done by going to:

Settings -> Cellular and scroll down to see the list of applications.

It turned out that App Store had used 600MB so far, yikes! So I immediately turned off use cellular data for App Store.

Automatic Update

The next thing that I did was going to Settings -> iTunes & App Store. Then turn off the automatic downloads for all off the items and make sure that use cellular data is not turned on.

Any Unfinished Updates?

Sometimes this can happen, the iPhone would start updating all the applications within my local LAN, however for some unknown reason some of them didn’t finish even though the update ran over night. If you allow cellular data for iTunes and App Store, this might be a problem. Sometimes during the day, those updates my resume, consuming a lot of the cellular data. Not good.

Of course Apple has restrictions that application above 100mb cannot be downloaded over cellular network. However we are dealing with updates, if you have 50 applications at 10MB each that would already be 500MB by themselves. I’m sure this was one of the cause of my unusually high data usages.

Did the Above Helped?

It seems that so far the above has helped stopping the surprising data usage on my phone. If I noticed anything else I will update this post.

Of course if you have any other suggestions, please leave your comments below this article, I’m sure they will help others a lot.

Thanks for this – I was told yesterday I had used well over 400MB of my 500MB/month allowance. At first I couldn’t see what had done it because the phone itself reckoned I’d used 339MB since October 9th, which would be about right. But my provider told me it was all automatic updates and I was certain they had been switched off before I upgraded to iOS7. Wasn’t impressed! Got a Nexus 5 now though as I’m sick of rubbish like this with iOS.

arvyb

No worries, I’m happy with my iPhone 5s, but I do wished that they make this kind of potential issues clear for all of us.